rainbow snippets: extraordinary release day!

Today’s Snippet comes from “Homecomings,” the second of the three stories in my Extraordinary box set, out as of today, April 27 – my MMM superheroes collection! I love John and Ryan and Holly, and their relationship, and Holly’s complicated past, and John’s terrible puns, and Ryan trying to be the organized one…

You can buy the box set at JMS Books here or at Amazon here, or anywhere you like to buy books!

(In case you’re not familiar with #RainbowSnippets, each week, authors post six (or more, if you’re wordy like me!) lines from a story, wip, etc – sharing the delight! Come check out the Rainbow Snippets Facebook Group – new posts every weekend (depending on time zones). The weekly pinned post will collect comments from authors linking to their six-line Rainbow Snippet post for the week.)

Here’re our heroes getting ready to face the mission of…well, visiting John’s parents…

~

“They’re going to hate me,” Holly breathed. “I shouldn’t come. You and Ryan should go and enjoy your father’s birthday weekend—”

“Holiday,” John interrupted, deep and firm, and took Holly’s face in both big hands, fingers framing desperate self-castigation. “I want you there.”

Around them, Clifftop’s kitchen nodded in granite encouragement. Sunshine popped in through a window to glint off Holly’s teakettle. They’d spent the day before tracking down an army of mischievous-but-not-evil robots-gone-wrong in Seattle; they’d been laughing, then, watching John hold two wriggling mechanical puppies up in one hand and attempt to lecture them into good behavior.

They’d come home to more laughter, and to each other.

Home, in one very specific way, was precisely the current problem.

Ryan stepped in too. He wasn’t as good as John at outright comfort, and these weren’t his parents, but he figured he could contribute, having been here before. “Look, John’s parents barely even put up with me. It’s not going to be about you. Not more than it’d be for anybody.”

That wasn’t entirely true, though it might be true enough to help. Pete and Sylvia Trent would have never disowned their only son—their pride and joy, the man who’d followed his father and grandfather into the Army and done well enough to be recruited into a secret supersoldier program, becoming a hero and a household name—for being gay. But they hadn’t precisely taken it well.

John had recounted that story for Ryan and—later—again for Holly, half laughing, half shaking his head: he’d met Robbie Rivers during basic training, and they’d been inseparable instantly, a perfect set of golden hair and brown, blue eyes and grey, matching terrible puns and bad joke competitions and a love of building projects in spare hours, all broad shoulders and mutual determination to save the world even before the successful acquisition of superpowers.

John had brought Robbie home for Christmas, that first year. His parents had regarded this development with sheer bafflement, and to this day—after the grief, after everything— threw in mentions of nice girls down the street or recently hired to work with John’s mother at the local library.

Ryan had, over the years, swung from flippant amusement to jealous annoyance to weary tolerance of this state of affairs. John was his—now theirs—and they were John’s; John’s parents would never jeopardize that. The Trents meant well, and as family went they could be worse.

Maybe not much worse. But worse.

“I’m not you.” Holly’s voice wavered: storms over antique castles. Ruins in the forest. “I’m not—if you’re not Robbie, I’m even more not—you know what I’ve been, what I’ve done—”

“It’s still not about that,” John said, and actually picked Holly up and went out to the main room and sat down with him on the couch. Unheeded, the vestiges of Holiday’s magic—they’d been planning to pop over into Tucson via mystic instant portal, until Holly’d panicked and let them see exactly how off-balance he felt—shimmered and dwindled. Wind ruffled ocean waves outside, beyond Clifftop’s hideout walls. The afternoon, falling into evening, cradled them in shades of blue and gold and oncoming indigo. “It’s about me. Dad only got along with Robbie because they had the Army in common, that was pretty much all, and both Dad and Mom are still holding out hope that I just need to meet the right girl. I keep pointing out that I’ve met the right guys—more than once—but so far that hasn’t, y’know, worked.”

“Come on,” Ryan said, settling in on the other side and scooping up Holly’s hands, “you have to listen to that, seriously, Pete and Sylvia only ever even tolerated Robbie, and everyone liked Robbie. So it’s not gonna be about you.”

Holly managed a shaky smile. Tipped his head to rest on John’s shoulder. Fingers cold, but being held. “Everyone did like him, didn’t they? I wish I’d known him. Even Mother once called him irritatingly competent, which considering the source was practically a vow to adopt him.”

John snorted with laughter. “He’d’ve loved it. Thanks for that.”

Robbie Rivers—once upon a time code-named Mercury, and everyone’d known them, everyone had loved them, Mercury and Sundown, tall and kind and strong and brave—had died preventing a nuclear explosion from destroying the world. John had simply gone on: not knowing what else to do, drifting through the motions, hollowed out, he’d tried to explain. Everything blank and flat. Saving people because Robbie would’ve wanted him to. Feeling no elation, no satisfaction, no quiet pride in a rescue or a triumph. Feeling nothing at all.

Until Ryan had run into the middle of an ice-gun robbery, crackling with electric power and frustration at the stories that kept calling him Captain Justice’s former sidekick. You knocked a gun out of someone’s hand with a lightning-bolt and grinned at me, John had said, and I felt like you’d hit me with it instead. White-hot. Waking up.

John Trent would never not love Robbie Rivers. Ryan and Holly, who loved and were loved by John today, did not mind sharing. Holiday, Ryan understood, regarded this love with a kind of startled awe at having any share in it at all, even three years in and counting. Ryan himself, secure in the present, could be magnanimous toward the memory.

“If I remember any other backhanded compliments from my parents I’ll let you know,” Holly said, wobbly but rallying. “I’m certain there were more. The two of you did keep foiling their plans.”

“It’s that irritating competence,” John said. “We were always good at that. Both the competence and the irritating. No one ever appreciates the puns.”

“You,” Ryan said, “once took down Doctor Invisible, and looked him right in the eye after you got the power-lock cuffs on, and then you said, and I quote, I just can’t see you getting out of this one, Dave.”

“You wish you’d thought of it.”

“I really, really don’t.”